Heather K (dentist in my spare time)'s Reviews > Divergent

I'm going to do something that I have never done before. I'm going to rate this book lower than every single one of my Goodreads friends. Do you know why?

Because I hated the CRAP out of this book.

Now what follows might offend some lovers of this book. To "Divergent" fans: I'm sorry I'm going to rip on one of your favorite books. But honestly I almost wish I had this in paperback form so I could get the satisfaction of throwing it in the garbage. With gusto. Or maybe the fireplace...

Let me start with the "world building", which I put in quotation marks because the world building here is some of the laziest that I have ever seen. Basically, the author explains that the society was split up into five factions, Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent), because of... reasons. Something vaguely alluded to a war and the factions splitting up bringing peace. Then all the world building is dropped. It just is. The splitting up into factions made absolutely no sense and it wasn't further explained at all.

On to the absolutely ridiculous way the factions were described. It was like a pre-teen girl was describing what was "cool" or "dangerous" or "boring" when the factions were given their unofficial dress codes. The Dauntless wore tattoos and black, because, you know, black is sooooo fearless. Also they had lots of piercings, which obviously translates to the recklessness of the Dauntless faction because God forbid the smarties get a piercing! And the Abnegation wore gray because gray clearly means you care for others. It was like a joke it was all so stupid.



Speaking of the Dauntless, what the F is with them and their trains? Is there any purpose of these trains? I know there are cars in this world so why don't the Dauntless drive cars? Do they want to be hobo-chic? They are always jumping on and off their trains. Is there is schedule? It seems mighty inconvenient. And these trains never seem to stop? Who designed this horrible system. And why do the Dauntless live underground? Because they just felt like it??? Another case of the horrible world building... *gah*

And the totally pointless initiation process of the Dauntless? TOTALLY pointless! It wasn't like "The Hunger Games" when the games actually served a purpose, these initiation fights and trials seemed so trivial that I couldn't care less one way or another what happened in them. It was dumb, dumb, dumb. *bangs head on wall*



I have to get to my mother of all pet peeves about this book: the idea of people being Divergent, or basically more than one faction. This has to be one of the most poorly executed concepts in the history of dystopian fiction. I have to ask, why is Tris so freaking special?? Multiple times it is mentioned that you can be shown to have an aptitude for one faction yet get initiated in a different one of your choosing. So wouldn't those people be Divergent????? If you can hack it in more than one faction, don't you possess the traits of both of those factions? Also, the transfers from other factions still possess traits of their home factions. Candors still tell the truth, Erudites still spout knowledge, and so on and so forth to infinity. So what made Tris such a special snowflake?? Why is she Divergent when the rest are just brushed aside???



I can't, I can't even...

And the romance... just NO. It felt so forced that it made me uncomfortable. We get almost no character development from Four and he had about as much chemistry with Tris as oil and water have together. It was painful, just painful.

Tris herself was also a terrible character. I didn't care for her at all. She was judgmental and irritating and NOTHING that I want in a heroine.

I was so annoyed with this book that the killings (which made no sense, by the way, because they seemed to serve no purpose, unlike in Red Rising or The Hunger Games) failed to move me at all. I didn't care one iota. Does that make me a horrible person?

I'm mad I wasted precious reading time with this book. I'm mad it is almost 500 pages of garbage. I'm mad that I'm the only one of my friends that hated it so I have no one else on my side.

I give up.